A New Jersey mother of four admitted to pouring boiling water on a 3-year-old boy who was living in a “house of horrors,” prosecutors said.
The report, citing Newark police, said the boy was treated at the hospital, released, and is now in protective custody.
The incident took place last December when she was one of six residents in the apartment who abused the child, officials have alleged.
“This child lived his first three years in a house of horrors,” Essex County Assistant Prosecutor Michael Morris told the NY Daily News. “Today’s plea resolves the case without the ordeal of the children having to testify.”
Buchan faces as many as five years in a New Jersey prison, the Daily News noted.
Mary Buchan, Bridget Buchan, Patricia Gamarra, Homer Searcy, and the boy’s mother Natacha Smith, were also arrested in the case. They are accused of abusing the boy in a type of “systematic and coordinated” corporal punishment, investigators said.
As of Friday, the five have been indicted but their cases are pending, Essex County Prosecutor’s Office Spokeswoman Katherine Carte told NJ Advance.
Newark school officials had alerted police to the abuse.
Meanwhile, the unnamed boy was among six children living in the apartment, including four of Patricia Buchan’s children. The five other children who were living in the home were also removed, prosecutors said.
Facts About Crime in the United States
Violent crime in the United States has fallen sharply over the past 25 years, according to both the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) and the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) (pdf).While the overall rate of violent crime has seen a steady downward drop since its peak in the 1990s, there have been several upticks that bucked the trend. Between 2014 and 2016, the murder rate increased by more than 20 percent, to 5.4 per 100,000 residents, from 4.4, according to an Epoch Times analysis of FBI data. The last two-year period that the rate soared so quickly was between 1966 and 1968.